This blog will present news items about the motion picture business, with emphasis on lower budget, independent film in most cases. Some reviews or commentaries on specific films, with emphasis on significance (artistic or political) or comparison, are presented. Note: No one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!

About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

“The Mars Underground: The Secret Story of Planet Mars”
(2007/2014), by Scott J. Gill (narrator, Rob Thorne) and Orange Dot, is a compelling 77 minute documentary
which outlines and makes a case for human settlement on Mars and even eventual
terraforming of the planet within a few hundred years.The

The central proponent for the project is engineer Robert
Zubrin, who established the Mars Society (link ) and
authored “The Case for Mars”. An
important colleague who often also appears is David Baker.

Zubrin, born in 1952, was a boy when Sputnik launched in
1957, and felt inspired to become a scientist.
Within a few years of the first man walking on the moon in 1969, the
space program floundered, and Zubrin became a science teacher, before finishing
graduate school and becoming an engineer again.

Even by the early 1990s, Zubrin had advocated a plan called “Mars
Direct”, which would involve sending separate unmanned components to Mars, to
be assembled by robots, before people land.
The first manned explorations would require a 2-1/2 year commitment,
with over 500 days (the Martian day is slightly longer than Earth’s) on the
planet. Crew would use pre-mailed
material to grow food and generate an atmosphere within living quarters, as
well as to fuel the return. Fuel can be
made with 19th century chemistry that used to run gas street lights
before we had electricity.

The most visually striking part of the film shows what Mars
would look like after terraforming, which would be accomplished by what is
happening on Earth – release of greenhouse gases, which would set off a runaway
chain reaction that would release water from the Martian soil with rapid warmup
of the planet (although this could take a few hundred years).

Zubrin argues that we should be determined to get to Mars as
simply and cheaply as possible at first, and force ourselves to settle new
lands, just as our ancestors did when they explored new worlds. He points out that man is naturally a
tropical creature, which gradually adapted to colder climates as it migrated by
inventing technology, although this took tens of thousands of years.

Selecting the crew, and the initial settlers, would
certainly raise issues we’ve never faced (although Zubrin says that long ship
voyages were just as challenging). Would
initial astronauts be people who did not intend to have children?

The film can be viewed free om YouTube from Documentary HD,
but it appears to be connected to Radius TWC. It has been viewed over a half million times
so far. I think it would make sense to process it with Extended Digital and
show it at science museums, like the Baltimore Science Center or the Franklin
Museum in Philadelphia, or similar facilities around the country. It could make some money that way.

See also a related film "The Last Days on Mars" Dec. 17, 2013. A couple of major films were "Mission to Mars" (2000, Brian de Palma, Disney) and "Red Planet" (Anthony Hoffman, WB, with Val Kilmer), also 2000). Don't forget John Carpenter's "Ghosts of Mars" (2001, Screen Gems).

I'll reiterate a link for Disney-Epcot's Mission Space and "Rocket to the Red Planet", which I hope to visit in April 2015, here, with a YouTube videohere with a crash landing on the polar ice cap. .

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Back in 2003, in a pre-interview for a “sales” job in
life-insurance, the presenter said, “We give you the words.” In these days before social media would
preclude double lives, I still wondered what kind of person could live with
this, being paid to pretend he was something he wasn’t and proselytize someone
else’s content. I don’t include acting
in this. But I do include pretending
someone else’s work is yours.

Tim Burton (“Big Fish”, 2003) takes this on, somewhat, in
his art satire “Big Eyes”. Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz) is the flim-flam marketer,
pretending to be the artist who really painted his wife’s (Margaret, played by
Amy Adams) works, all comical faces with pancake eyes. The only psychological justification seems to
be old-fashioned sexism: meeting her, after he left first husband in 1958, it
made perfect sense to him that he could possess his bride’s work as his own if
he “protected” her and she could perhaps give him progeny. To me, it’s hard to believe that such an
arrangement could maintain sexual excitement, let alone any integrity. But the world then was not as individualistic
as now.

The film is really quite funny, as Walter’s scheme descends
into the picture, a façade disguised by their upper income lifestyle in the
California wine country. Then, as so
often with Burton, it ceases to be funny – until the final courtroom climax in
Hawaii, where the script makes a useful distinction between libel and slander,
and then gives both husband and wife a “laboratory examination”.

Some of the background history is interesting -- like the clips of the construction of the New York Worlds Fair in 1964 in Flushing, near what is now CitiField for the Mets. I actually visited the fair in the summer of 1965 with college friends. The film also shows an amusing Perry Mason excerpt.

The concept of Walter reminds me of the lead character "Gentle" in Clive Barker's huge fantasy novel "Imajica" (1991) because Gentle is an art forger (see Book reviews, March 28, 2006). The film has yet to be made.

I saw the film at the Angelika Mosaic in Fairfax VA before a
moderate evening crowd, but the auditorium was very cold.

Update: July 19, 2017

Jeffrey Tucker of the Foundation of Economic Education discusses the movie from the viewpoint of copyright, intellectual property, and creativity here. Electronic Frontier Foundation would agree with him.

Monday, December 29, 2014

“Ivory Tower” has been a film title more than once (June 23,
2014), but this review is about a 1998 indie film from Vanguard, directed by
Derrin Ferriola, concerning Silicon Valley startups in the earlier days.

The setup is that the likable protagonist Anthony (Patrick Van Horn)
gets a new project in the dot-com boom world, but is upended when an autocratic
new vice president (Michael Ironside) walks in the door and makes his life
miserable.

The new boss (Mr. Felice) indeed off the charts, looking the
employees into the office and taking out the coke machines so they won’t leave
their cubicles. And he plays every
conceivable game of office politics.

One problem with the film now is that the scenario is dated,
since the dot-com boom crashed. This
film long predates social media as we know it today. But the idea of Internet TV is discussed. There is some discussion of firmware engineering and one demonstration.

The “green boss” wants to maximize short term profits with
older technology, and doesn’t want to gamble with profits now with investing in
the future. That was more a common
business dilemma in the 1980s, with hostile takeovers. The boss doesn’t even
see the value of the World Wide Web the way we know it today. But at the very
end, he pulls a pleasant surprise. The title of the film comes from a viewing perch from which he overlooks his underlings at a "science fair" toward the end.

The DVD transfer is of somewhat substandard quality; the resolution is weaker, and the images tend
to expand slightly width-wise.

Comparisons could be made with “August” (Aug. 1, 2008) and
“Startp.com”.

Sunday, December 28, 2014

“Into the Woods” is Disney’s film adaptation (directed by Rob Marshall) of Stephen
Sondheim’s Broadway musical fantasy, and the plot trick is to bring together a
number of characters from Grimm’s Fairy Tales in one story. As is so often the
case, this “kids’ movie” has a lot of undertone for adults to ponder.

The genesis of the story is the desire of a baker (James
Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt) to start a family, and they are kept from
doing so by a curse of The Witch (Meryl Streep, who is appropriately dominating
and chilling). The Witch demands that the Baker couple obtain four critical
items, which include a gold slipper.

The ensuing plot brings in other stories, first Cinderella
(to be a Disney remake in March) about Jack and the Beanstalk (which creates two falsetto tornadoes), the Big Bad Wolf
(Johnny Depp, rather in drag), Rapzunel, and Little Red Ridinghood.

The film seems to come to a premature happy ending, as the
Baker fulfills the demand and the wife has a baby, two-thirds through the film,
but then there is a long sequence in which “happily ever after” is not exactly
that. A major complication is that the
wife is now attracted to the Prince (Chris Pine). And an oversized female villain (as if they
were all Lulliputians) has to be destroyed because she keeps causing
earthquakes in the kingdom. Maybe they
all live in someone’s model world.

The Prince and his friend (Rapzunel’s prince, Billy
Magnussen) engage in an odd quasi-gay scene at almost the midpoint of the
film. The both pull apart their own
shirts, showing (at least in Pine’s case) shaved chests. Pine repeats the stunt in the closing
credits. It’s almost as if the
characters had been tempted by something else, and the Witch picked up on.

Sondheim’s music has more dissonance than do most Broadway
musicals, with an odd theme on the interval of a fourth that reminds one of
Britten. The last song ends quietly, but
the credits start with an epilogue song that ends with some triumph, and there
follows what sounds like a concert overture in the orchestral style of
Prokofiev.

I saw this Sunday afternoon at Regal Ballston in a large
auditorium before a small crowd, but I know performances at Angelika Mosaic
were selling out.

The official site is here. Note the image of Chris Pine, differs from
the movie.

The original Broadway production won a lot of awards in
1998. Material like this really works
better on stage. It’s interesting to
see a musical based on the “moral issues” that surround making decisions to
have children, or even not have them. There’s also the idea (touted by the Family
Research Council) that men give up some testosterone once they become dads.
That’s for grownups.

Update: Jan. 3

Talking Points Memo has an article by Ester Bloom, "Before 'Into the Woods' was a Disney movie, it was an AIDS Parable", here, as Sondheim structured the last part of the musical when he wrote it in 1987, when AIDS had raged for several years in NYC, link here.

Saturday, December 27, 2014

I went to see Sony’s “The Interview” at the Alamo Drafthouse
in Ashburn, VA, in Loudoun County, on a mild December Saturday “in the country”. In fact, when I bought the ticket online
Friday night, I got the next-to-last seat, and was on the front row. But in the Drafthouse, with the food service
and wider rows, that’s OK. For security, there was a uniformed officer from the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office in the lobby. At the
Manassas 4 (in another exurban community thirty miles to the south) it didn’t
seem you could buy tickets online at all.

And Google’s home page, for a while om Christmas Day, had
read “Our goal is to make the world’s information accessible, yes, even Seth
Rogen movies”, with a link to rent on Google Pay (or YouTube) for $5.99,here

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg direct the satire (really of
the ‘Dr. Strangelove” genre) and Seth Rogen and James Franco play buddies
(tabloid producer Aaron Rappaport and talk show host Dave Skylark) who set up “The
Interview” with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un (Randall Park) – initiated by
North Korea. Now Franco (now 36) looks a
little weathered but is by far the fitter of the tag team. Rogen, well, is a bit like an aging bear, a
little fattish, but not as foppish and smooth-skinned as the North Korean emir,
who is worshipped as a sexless god by his people – he is said never to excrete
and have no “holes”. The Golden Calf
made a better idol. Kim's attempt at "radical hospitality" and acting like a good buddy collapses appropriately.

The opening scene sets the tone of the film, with a Korean
woman threatening the US. Soon Skylark
is interviewing Eminem, who says he utters homophobic slurs because he’s gay
himself. Really? Once Rappaport sets up
the “interview” the CIA shows up (with the female agent Lacey played by Lizzy
Caplan) with its plan to “take him out” with ricin conveyed in a palms-down
handshake – the scene widely touted in trailers.

The film really does play up the national security dangers
(to us) of a nuclear North Korea.
Remembe how George Tenet had warned around 2003 that the DPRK was
capable of lobbing a missile as far as the US Pacific Northwest. And, for all
the screwball slapstick comedy, Skylark gets the chance to humiliate Kim in
debate – which may be the most humiliating aspect of the film for Kim in real
life. Indeed, the film proposes that his
regime is overthrown after he goes. What
if the people in North Korea really do get copies of this movie?

I recall back in the 1990s (during the Clinton years) that a
lot of the talk about the challenges face by the military centered around the
idea of a second war in Korea, not so much on radical Islam.

Is seeing the film now a "patriotic act"? Some people argue that watching plays into Kim's hand, of falling for a deep double-cross and giving him propaganda for his own people. But I rather buy the idea that balloons laced with DVD's flying over the North could start something.

Sony’s official site requires entry of a Tumblr password,
which seems bizarre. The Facebook site
is here. The branding is still Columbia Pictures, although the distribution is more like what you would see as Sony Pictures Classics.

Alamo played, as a preshow, a spoof of SNL, which seemed to be
hosted by Wallace Shawn, with one skit showing a gay “bear” motorcycle couple
preparing to marry in Utah, in Monument Valley.
A later spoof made fun of the acronym “GOP”.

On Friday, Dec. 26 NBC Today had aired a cooking show
segment from NE South Korea, from near the DMZ.

A couple of other movies to compare this to, besides those
already mentioned: The James Bond “Die Another Day” (2002), as well as “Red
Dawn II” (cf blog Nov. 22, 2012). See an earlier posting that discussed the hacker threats against this movie and Sony's waffling at distribution on Dec. 18.

Picture: The Moon
surface, on display board at One Loudoun in front of theater.

Friday, December 26, 2014

I am not particularly a fan of “life-raft” movies, or of
films focusing on torture of good guys forever.
Nevertheless, I found “Unbroken”, directed by Angelina Jolie, quite
compelling. The end result was somewhat
that of a big 80s movie, but that “ain’t bad”. And this time, it leads to more
reflection of my own character. The film is based on Laura Hillenbrand’s book “Unbroken:
A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption.” The screenwriters are the Coen Brothers (Joel
and Ethan Coen) but this film hardly seems typical of their work.

The film is a biography (through V-J Day of WWII) of Louis
Zamperini, (Jack O’Connell), who survived a plane crash in the Pacific Ocean in
1943, and was held under brutal conditions in a Japanese POW camp until the
end. The Japanese did not follow the
rules of the Geneva Convention, which we were taught in Army Basic (in 1968),
to say the least, but the conditions may have been more survivable than either
Hitler’s or Stalin’s.

The film starts with an air battle, which leads to the
crash. The earlier events are told in
flashback, and those related to combat (including an earlier crash landing) are
a bit confusing. But his boyhood as a “wop”
(played by C. J. Valleroy) is compelling, and leads to his running track in the
1936 Olympics in Berlin, expecting to repeat in 1940 in Tokyo! I wanted to see more of the 1936 event, to
see what Germany looked like to athletes then, and if they could pick up on any
clue as to what Hitler was doing. But
that might have made a different movie.

Once in the camp, Louis has repeated confrontations with the
abusive “Bird” Watanabe (Takamasa Ishihara), who makes his (and the other
prisoners’) status as an enemy very personal, gratuitously so. He was said to be spoiled when raised in the
aristocracy, and he acts sometimes like his sadistic pleasure is sexual. At one point, he gets the prisoners to
perform a Cinderella show in drag.

The life-raft sequence has the guys catching an albatross,
but vomiting after trying to eat it; but soon they learn the virtue of “free
fish”, even if raw.

There's one other point hinted. The movement of prisoners to Tokyo (before taking them high in the mountains), might have figured into Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb on (other) cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Other stars include Garrett Hedlund and Australian
heartthrob Jai Courtney, neither of whom you want to see abused.

The film calls to mind a number of films of partial genre
match: “All Is Lost”, “Life of Pi”, “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” (1983). One
might even draw a comparison to “Pearl Harbor” (2001) with the Doolitle raid at
the end.

Tom Brokaw discussed the movie tonight on NBC News,
interviewing Louis at age 97. The idea
came up that the people who survive enemy capture best are those who are
extroverted and “like people’.

All of this gets personal for me. I “volunteered for the draft” in 1968 and “served
without serving” in a rather sheltered capacity, although I spent three weeks
in Special Training Company at Fort Jackson SC.
I used to say, when a grad student (before service), that if I were
maimed or disfigured in Vietnam combat, I didn’t want to come back. In fact, I wasn’t the only one who said that
then. It may sound cowardly, and most of
us don’t really know how we would react.
But the idea of expecting someone to love you (even sexually) after
disfigurement or extreme disability caused by the violence of others, has always
seemed revolting. Yet, I can understand
that unless people are game for that, a whole society will become fractured and
more vulnerable to dismemberment by enemies.
That may be a valuable point to remember in considering the “values” of
enemies of the West today (probably radical Islam – Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Iran –
more than communism, even North Korea).
Yet, I tend to see the personal aspect of this as cut and dried. Sacrifice is what it is – paying back karma,
perhaps. Playing up victimhood or even
heroism doesn’t work for me. Yet, I understand that forensic psychiatrists say people have to learn this as part of "resilience", maybe not so much for their own immediate good as for everyone else.

The official site is here, from
Universal and Legendary (which usually works with Warner Brothers, especially
with Christopher Nolan). I saw this at
Angelika Mosaic on Friday afternoon, Boxing Day, before a sold-out crowd. The film is long, at 137 minutes, and rather
expansive, like a director’s cut, and somewhat styled like an independent film
(like Universal Focus) rather than studio.
Yet, to do justice to the Olympics material, which should have been
done, the film would top at about 160 minutes.
Expect the DVD to include more background material on this matter. The film was shot largely in Australia,
including the use of Fox studios there, swell as Queensland for the tropical
scenes. The music, by Andre Desplat, is
not as original as some of his other scores. The film has no relation to M. Night Shyamalan's "Unbreakable" (2000) although the similarity of title is noteworthy, but probably coincidental.

See more of an earlier broadcast by Tom Brokaw on this movie on TV blog Dec. 9, 2014.

Thursday, December 25, 2014

“Selma”, directed by Ava DuVernay and written by Paul Webb,
is probably the most complete account of the (three) Selma-to-Montgomery civil
rights marches in March 1965 in all visual media.

The two-hour widescreen film opened to only
four theaters in the DC area Christmas Day.
I saw it today at the AMC Hoffman Center in Alexandria, VA, in a very
large auditorium, two-thirds full, largely African-American audience. It applauded at the end. The detailed history
is given in Wikipedia here.

An early scene shows a black woman trying to register to
vote, and the country registrar makes her recite the preamble to the
Constitution, then give the number of counties in Alabama (67), and name all
the county judges, which of course no one could. Another scene reenacts the bombing at a Baptist church in Birmingham AL in 1963, resulting in the death of three girls.

Then there are many scenes between Dr. Martin Luther King (David
Olewoyo) and President Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson, who is not as
convincing a likeness as one might want).
Johnson is interested in his war on poverty but doesn’t want to focus on
voting rights by itself. But after the
first march, on March 7, 1965, leads to vicious police trampling of the
demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in front of 70 million viewers live
on CBS, things do change. The second
attempt at a march, after many sympathetic white people come from the North,
aborts even though police withdraw, as King, after prayer, fears that the police
have set a trap. Finally, Johnson is
persuaded to protect the marchers with federal troops. The argument is made that he is already
sending men to Vietnam, but this was very early in Johnson’s Vietnam buildup
with the huge draft calls that would come soon (and [‘ensnare” me in 1968).

There is a conversation where Johnson says to King, “You are
a civil rights activist, I am a politician”. King sometimes gives collective guilt rhetoric, and makes participation in group demonstration a moral imperative.

There are also some conversations between Johnson and Gov.
George Wallace (Tim Roth). Wallace had
an odd way of rationalizing what he knew was wrong and spinning double-talk. I remember Wallace’s run for president in 1968 as an independent was
interesting, because he wanted to combine opposition to desegregation with
otherwise liberal Democrat social spending (Wiki ). When I got stationed to Fort Eustis
VA in September 1968, one of the soldiers in the barracks and coworker, trying
to convert to Mormonism, said that he admired Wallace because he wasn’t a “candy-ass”. Later the young man’s views moderated as he
came to share the view of most soldiers that Nixon would be more likely to end
the war in Vietnam sooner than a Democratic candidate, a position that sounds
odd now, but was reasonable then. It
seems shocking now what our attitudes were then.

In early 1965, in fact, I was still a full time student at
George Washington University in Washington, living at “home” after the 1961
catastrophe at William and Mary. I would
finish in January 1966 and enter graduate school at KU immediately. I didn’t realize how sheltered I was.

The film plays up the practical concerns of vigilante Klan
violence and the corruption of the local police and sheriffs, the latter of
whom feared they would lose office once blacks could vote (and they did). For
example, the name and address of any black who even tried to register to vote
was publishes in local newspapers so that local Klansmen could come after
them. It was a kind of domestic
terrorism.

I visited Selma myself this year on Friday, May 23,
2014. I visited the museum and its film
on the road from Montgomery. To me, most
of the state still looks economically backward. The film appears to be filmed on location in
Alabama, as the river and main street areas of Selma are exactly what I
saw. I found it hard to find an
appealing place to have lunch after walking the Pettus Bridge area.

Other cast in the film include Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott
King (MLK’s wife), and Oprah Winfrey as Annie Lee Cooper.

The official site is here. The film has the look of large independent
film with Pathe (a European production company for festival-ready material) and
Harpo Films (Oprah) but is distributed on the main Paramount brand. Harpo also usually works with MGM. I could easily have imagined this film coming
from TWC.

This one should get on the Best Picture list for the Osca,
alongside “Lincoln”.

Scenery pictures are mine from the May 2012 visit. The BW photos are from an iPhone, the color from a Nikon and a Casio.

Update: Jan 3.

There is controversy, in the way some say that the film unfavorably portray's LBJ's hesitancy, CBS story here.

Update: Jan 13

Tim Lee on Vox Media explains Paramount's decision not to quote MLK's "I have a dream" speech directly, but to rewrite it, out of a very conservative use of copyright law and fair use, because of the possibly catastrophic result of a lawsuit from an estate known to be litigious, link here. There's an argument here to strengthen fair use or to shorten copyright terms.

HBO was good enough to broadcast the overlooked 2013 musical
“Black Nativity” (directed by Kasi Lemmons) on Christmas even (going against
Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” on NBC).

The musical is adapted by the director from a libretto by
Langston Hughes and has a lot of “soul music”, reminding me of the 1982 fest, “Say
Amen, Somebody” (George T. Nierenberg). The latter film I remember seeing in Minneapolis in 1998 while recovering from my hip fracture, getting a lot of attention in a Landmark theater there.

“Black Nativity” tells the story of street-smart teen
Langston (Jacob Latimore), raised by a single mom in Baltimore. In one of the songs early in the movie he
describes himself as “motherless”. He
hops on a Peter Pan bus to New York City to visit estranged relatives, Reverend
Cornell and Aretha Cobbs (Forest Whitaker and Angela Bassett). He resents the minister’s rules and gets in
trouble with the law, trying to rob the father (Vondie Curtis-Hall). who had
abandoned him in a climatic scene that seems over the top. He gets a measure of
faith, even from a street prophet (Nas Jones).

As for the James Steward character George Bailey in the
classic 1946 film mentioned above, I’ve always
been impressed by how much difference one’s own life can make on others. I think that's still true of me. See other comments Dec. 23, 2007 about this classic. Note the "complete film" on the Paris Theater in New York City in he picture above (Sept. 22, 2014).

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

New Yorker Films (aka Rialto and Janus Films) sells a DVD of
a 1975 film version of the opera “Moses and Aaron” (or “Moses und Aron”) by
Arnold Schoenberg, composer of the music and writer of the original libretto in
German in 1930. The directors are Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.

Moses and Aaron are played by Gunter Reich and Louis Devos
respectively. The German Radio Orchestra is conducted by Michael Gielen.

The film has all three acts, but music was completed only
for the first two, and the third act, with spoken dialogue only, is very brief.

The film stresses rather static acting outdoors, in a
setting that appear to be shot around the Sea of Galilee in Israel. The
scenery, if a little faded with age, is breathtaking, with panoramas that
remind me of “The Sound of Music” even if the music here is expressionistic and
disturbing. It's interesting to see this film now after Ridley Scott's "Exodus" (Dec. 14).

Actually, Schoenberg isn’t hard to get used to. His earliest works are late romantic,
following Mahler (like the “Gurrelieder”) and even his larger “atonal” works
start striking the ear as the logical outcome of very late Maher. The music really makes perfect sense and
supports the story, and is almost lush, for all the atonality and dissonance,
especially in the massed choral passages as well as the more intimate
chamber-music interludes.

The most controversial sense in the opera is Scene 3 of Act
2, “The Golden Calf”, taking about 25 minutes.
While Moses is on Mt, Sinai receiving The Ten Commandments, the
Israelites grow impatient and start worshipping the golden calf idol that they
have built. The libretto describes all
kind of debauchery, including the undressing of virgins, songs about fecundity,
and even suicides.

The film visuals soft-pedal
these activities, although there is some distant nudity in a couple spots.
There is a passage of actors’ break-dancing to the music (not “dirty dancing”),
some of which really grabs the attention of the musical ear with the unusual
sequences of 12-tone passages in the brass. The whole episode makes one ponder
why one has to “take orders” in how to believe in Jehovah (or Allah, for that
matter), and why the worship of one’s own ideals (“upward affiliation”) can
lead to social breakdown – a constant theme of social conservatism, especially
religiously based.

The DVD has a 16-minute short film “Introduction to Arnold
Schoenberg’s ‘Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene’” (1973), where letters
from the composer are read. The material
relates Schoenberg’s growing concern over fascism and the need to leave Germany
in the 1930s. He also expresses a
skepticism about the morality of capitalism and even too much emphasis on
private property, as he sees it as leading to neglect, and corruption from
those seeking to keep their wealth. The
ideology, as read, sounds like Marxism to me.

The DVD libretto booklet includes commentary by Michael Gallope ("Sacred music you can't consume") and Allen Shawn.

The YouTube excerpt above comes from a 2006 performance of
the work with the Vienna State Opera.

Having visited a spectacular “alien worlds” exhibit in
Baltimore last week (Dec. 17), I looked at a few more films that actually give
some idea of what a visit to a black hole would “look like” if you could
survive it.

The best of these is a six-minute short from “Deep Astronomy”,
titled simply “Journey into a Black Hole”, written and narrated by Tony Darnell.

The film shows how an orbiting spacecraft and the capacity
to escape the gravitational field work in relation to the “Shwarzchild Radius” (link ). If a black hole is very large and if
for a while you could be shielded from the intense heat and radiation, you
might not notice anything wrong as you entered it, but time would stop (after
slowing down) and you could never escape.
Eventually you would be torn apart as you descended. But the light show you would see is quite mathematically
interesting (more than just in “2001: A Space Odyssey”). This would be a good film to adapt to show in
a planetarium in a science museum.

There is a Featurette for “Interstellar” that shows how the
special effects for the black hole were designed, and they do resemble those in
this short somewhat.

A channel called “Documentaries in HD” offers “Cosmic Monster
Black Holes” (link), a 66 minute video, focuses on the monster black holes at the
centers of galaxies and what happens when they merge. But the film seems a mashup (from both NatGeo
and the History Chanel): Toward the end,
it presents a story about UFO lights and crop circles in Britain in the late
1990s. It also presents what Earth and
Moon look like from Saturn. The film
notes that stellar-mass black holes are relatively common and there could be a
few million in our galaxy. Fortunately,
none are close to us (as far as we know).

There is a 45-minute
video “Black Holes and Wormholes”, from Discovery, which I think I have seen
before and probably discussed on the TV blog.
But I wanted to reemphasize the discussion of micro black holes, which
might get generated by the Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Wikipedia has a
discussion of Micro black holes here and relates their evaporation (through
Hawking radiation) to possible dark energy. The video also discusses the idea
of wormholes as a “subway” system among universes, and says that the Big Bang
might have been an example of a “White Hole”. It also examines the logical
paradoxes of backward time travel.

The video mentions
the 1997 film “Contact”, based on the novel by Carl Sagan, directed by Robert
Zemeckis, with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey, from Warner Brothers. I saw this film this film the day I published
my first “Do Ask Do Tell” book (July 11, 1997).
In the film, scientists receive encoded messages from aliens, and
eventually go through a wormhole.

Stephen Hawking has his own short “Black Hole Time Travel” put
up by “The cosmos is within us”, showing how time slows down for astronauts
orbiting close to a black hole.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

“They Call It Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain” (2012) is a visually stunning documentary
about the world’s second most reclusive country, directed by Robert H. Lieberman,
a Cornell physics professor, and written by David Kossack. The film was shot in clandestine fashion over two years. That would make for a good short.

The film stresses the religious background of the people,
Buddhist, and their belief in karma and reincarnation. There is a feeling that you lead the life you
deserve. You share hardships.

And indeed, the livings standards except for the super rich
are low. The film shows villages built
right on canals on the water, almost like “Lake-Town” in “The Hobbit”. It also shows shantytowns, not too far from
spectacular monuments. Electricity is
unpredictable. Children have to go to
work to support their parents and siblings, and can be sold.

The military dictatorship seems to lack a coherent ideology,
and has not particularly visible leader (unlike North Korea). Young men go into the military because there
are no other real opportunities, so they tend to reach positions of power with
little education.

The film also shows a major typhoon and its effects. Myanmar (aka Burma) is on the Indian Ocean
between Bangladesh and Thailand. The entire middle of the country is very low and near water and floods easily.

Toward the end, the film covers briefly the history o Aung
San Suu Kwi, about which Cohen Media had released “The Lady” (April 27. 2012).

Monday, December 22, 2014

“Eastern Boys”, by Moroccan-French director Robin Campillo,
is a powerful film about not only the politics of immigration and sexuality,
but also about personal engagement with others.

Daniel (Olivier Rabourdin) is a relatively fit gay man in
his late 50s, well-to-do and living in a comfortable condo high rise in
suburban Paris. One day, near a train station in north Paris, he runs into
an attractive hustler Marek (whom we later learn Is Rouslan, from Ukraine),
played by Kirill Emelyanov, and makes a deal.
But Marek asks for his address and want to come the next day.

The door knocks “tomorrow” all right, but it is a tween, who
warns that he is a child and that Daniel will get in trouble with the law for
soliciting a minor if he doesn’t go along with the scheme. A horde of about ten young men (mostly
straight) and one or two women come in with successive knocks, in a “home
invasion” where they take Daniel’s electronics and art. But then Rouslan shows up, and Daniel indeed
falls in love with him, and begins to support him with an allowance. When Rouslan returns to the cheap hotel where
the other illegal immigrant kids hang out and hide from the law, Daniel winds
up having to “rescue” him.

This is a long film (128 minutes), which I reviewed from a
screener (First Run Features), although it may be a director’s cut and some
scenes might get deleted before formal release in February 2015. It is in four “chapters”, almost as if it had
been conceived as a cable TV series once: “The Mystery of the Street”, “The
Party of which I Am Hostage”, “What We Mean Together”, and “Hotel: Dungeons and
Dragons”. The film is shot in full
2:35:1 and has a grand look, and was obviously very professionally shot and
edited (with Studio Canal).

The first ten minutes, around the train station, have almost
no dialogue: you hear the street noise
of a Paris “gare”, often viewed from the air.
Immigrant boys behave in odd fashion, at least one jumping and riding
piggyback on the back of a stranger. I’ve
never seen that happen in person when in Europe or anywhere. I’ve been around a lot in areas like this, in
Paris, London, Glasgow, Birmingham, Brussels, Amsterdam, Toulouse, Lisbon, San
Sebastian, Hamburg, Stockholm, Oslo. In
fact, I do remember that an older man tried to pick me up at a hotel bar in
Kiruna, Sweden when I was 28. All this
comes to mind.

Daniel seems to be a somewhat detached loner as the film
starts, and we don’t get much information about what he “does”, in work, or in
any kind of self-expression. He seems to
be a bureaucrat, not particularly artistic.

The film touches on some political hot points: legal recognition of gay relationships
(marriage itself doesn’t come up, but it could have, at the end), and gay
rights in Eastern European countries.
Were Rouslan to get deported, he could go back to a country somewhat
hostile, The movie doesn’t say this
directly, but his circumstances would get even worse if he is from eastern
Ukraine or Crimea and it gets taken over by Russia, with its anti-gay laws. This
film won’t please Vladimir Putin.

Visually, the movie somewhat plays up the stereotypes. The camera keeps emphasizing Rouslan’s
smooth, hairless body, contrasting it with Daniel, who looks a bit like an
oaf. You would wonder if Rouslan himself
is underage, even though socially he seems very street smart and mature, even
articulate.

I don’t see awards for this film; I would have expected it to win some in the
festival circuit.

The official site is here. for First Run and Peccadillo. Apparently it comes to some cities very soon
(New York, LA, etc). This sounds like a
good film to show in DC at the West End
Cinema, or for an HRC screening with Reel Affirmations. About half of the film is in English; the
rest is in French, with some Russian and Ukraine, with subtitles.

Wikipedia attribution link for shot of Paris similar to film
opening (photo by AFP - French Press Agency as author, CC-SA 3.0, unported)..

Sunday, December 21, 2014

Vigilantism may be an current topic now, and the 1995 film “Eye
for an Eye” (and maybe “tooth for a tooth”) by John Schlesinger, from
Paramount, dramatizes the issue in workmanlike manner.

Sally Field plays Karen McCann, an middle-aged mom in Santa
Monica, and is talking on the cell phone on a clunky 90s cell phone in LA
traffic with her teen daughter, when a delivery man Robert Doob (Kiefer
Sutherland) rapes and murders the child.

The police (Joe Mantegna as Sgt. Denillo) catch him, but
prosecutors blow it on a technicality (failure to present some crude DNA and
sperm evidence to the defense) at a preliminary hearing. Doob, who is quite creepy, walks free.

McCann stalks him, and see some harrowing behavior, like
grooming of kids in a playground.
Nevertheless, police tell her not to follow him. She joins a vigilante group and takes
firearms and self-defense training, something that will please today’s 2nd
Amendment supporters. But the group is
infiltrated by a female FBI agent who warns McCann that she could go to jail
for life if she takes out Doob on her own.
The agent is interesting: she is
presented as an African American lesbian raising a biological son in a
relationship with a white female. In the
meantime, police keep stumbling trying to get evidence on Doob.

McCann “solves her problem” by enticing Doob to come to her
home to attack her, where she can shoot him down in self-defense in a bombastic
conclusion.

Ed Harris plays the middle-aged husband, sympathetic but a
bit oafish in this role.

The film is rather plodding, not as gripping as some other
police films of the 90s, like David Fincher’s “Se7en”.

The film can be rented on YouTube for $2.99, and is
available from Netflix.

Friday, December 19, 2014

I hope it was indeed a really patriotic act to buy a regular
movie theater ticket (at Regal Ballston) to a Sony-Columbia release tonight,
the musical “Annie” (remade from 1982), music by Charles Strouse, lyrics by
Matinin Charnin, book by Thomas Meehan, based on the comic strip “Little Orphan
Annie” by Harold Gray, with this new version directed by Will Gluck. This is supposed to be one of the films
released to pirates by the Sony Hack, so seeing this movie legally may help a
little.

Annie is played by Louisiana-born Quvenzhanze Wallis, and
Jamie Foxx plays Will Stacks, the rich, single NYC mayoral candidate. Cameron Diaz plays the sassy foster mom, who
clearly needs the $157 per child a month from New York State. Bobby Cannavale
plays the unscrupulous election campaign manager.

The big event in the film is Stacks’s taking over foster
care of Annie as a single dad, after some prodding, because it looks good to
the campaign, catering to “family values”. He certainly offers "radical hospitality", although it need not cost him. His penthouse is a real showplace that would please Donald Trump. There are plenty of video murals on the
walls, but the real views outside seem to look on the new Freedom Tower in
lower Manhattan (which means it would have lost power during Hurricane
Sandy). There is an odd white
player-piano, which also plays manually – reminding me of a concert that I
attended in a condo (though near Central Park) and written up on the “Drama
blog” Dec. 11, 2010.

There’s also a pooch, who looks a bit like a fox. Annie is very street-smart and helpful to Will. and it's a bit surprising when she mentions her illiteracy. Annie asks Stacks why he has so much space,
and he says he likes to work alone with a lot of space around him, and that in
life there will be very few people who actually will love you. Annie’s question almost seems like one from a
moral lens, that so much space and splendor should house more people.

There really is a moral edge in this near-kids' movie. Should Will be expected to prove he can provide for others before he earns fame through work, or only after? It's also interesting that in another sense he is seen as an African-American male role model: a "self-made" man who started a novel telecommunications company.

There is a curious line about Kim Sung-Il in the script. Sony didn't try to remove it at the last minute because of the hack, thankfully.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Having been engrossed in New Line’s “The Lord of the Rings”
trilogy last decade (the last film is literally a 195-minute cliff hanger – “The
Ring is mine”), following a prequel series (even from Peter Jackson) leaves me
a bit ho-hum, and I believe Tolkien’s original novel “The Hobbit” is blown up
for financial gain. The details of the
plot don’t seem to matter too much. But the action and settings are
spectacular, most of all in this third installment, “The Hobbit: The Battle of
the Five Armies.”

Nevertheless, this is the story of how Bilbo Baggins (Martin
Freeman) went on the lam for a few years and helped save Middle Earth from a
whole set of villains. At the end, he
returns home to the middle of his own estate sale. I wonder how much his little hobbit-home with
the circular archways sells for.

Middle Earth is, after all, rather like an Earth-2, maybe in a parallel
universe, or maybe a few hundred light years away. The civilization looks like the Middle Ages
here, but with the people more genetically varied, and hence we have hobbits,
and monsters.

The movie starts with the sacking of Lake-Town (by Smaug and
company). Refugees are driven to the walled,
gated cities in the mountains. Remember
how Late-Town looked like an Elizabethean village. It still does, or did, until it burned.

People in this culture can live only communally. They have to stick together and depend on one
another. Men are expected to fight to
protect women and children. Several
times in the movie there is a scream like “women and children only”. One warrior (I think Thorin, Richard
Armitage) says he will come from behind the fortress walls and fight like a
man. There’s fake transsexual character,
Alfrid (Ryan Gage) who seems to be gender-bending to get out of fighting (his
slip shows, he wears falsies, and his chest is hairless).

Even the monsters sacrifice themselves, throwing their
behemoth bodies against fortress walls to knock them down, before dropping
dead.

Official blog is here. Warner Brothers distributes a joint production of New Line and MGM.

I saw this in 3-D and extended digital at Regal Ballston
before a small audience. It seemed like a “patriotic duty”.

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Today, at the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore, I saw
the Planetarium film “We Are Aliens”, directed by Max Crow, narrated by Rupert
Grint (from the Harry Potter movies).
This film used the entire ceiling, rather than half, as in Omnimax.

The film opens with an interesting animation of a Planet,
set up as a kind of spherical model railroad, with buildings, channels, and
trains. I had suggested a concept like that in my own novel manuscript “Tribunal
and Rapture” in 1988.

The film soon takes us to Mars, and shows some pretty good
scenery, especially a map of where the oceans once were. But the most interesting part is the visit
to Europa, moon of Jupiter. A robot dives
down a spectacular ice canyon, and then into the under-ice ocean, where we see
fumeroles and what look like colorful tube worms, and various other
smudges. There are also luminescent rotifer-like
creatures. (See "Europa Report", Aug 2,. 2013).

I'd like to have seen the surface of Titan (moon of Saturn) shown (and by they way, it has a subsurface ocean, too). Ganymede (satellite of Jupiter) also has such an ocean.

Then the film shows some extrasoloar planets, including a
hot Jupiter, a waterworld, and a furnace.
Finally it shows an odd habituated planet. It seems to be tidally locked. The
civilization, probably a satellite from a “master race” seems to be on the night
side of a warm planet, with a climate like South Florida at night, and with the
inhabited areas laid out in illuminated hexagons.

Finally, the film shows a possible galactic map of many
civilizations. Would they all have
Facebook?

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

“Edge of Tomorrow”, (aka “Live Die Repeat”) is indeed a
summer movie (from May 2014), directed by Doug Liman, based on the “light
novel”, “All You Need Is Kill” by Horoshi Sakurazaka.

There is a premise which recalls another movie, “Source
Code”, which I reviewed on my “cf” blog April 2 2011. Another more distantly related film is
“Vantage Point” on 2008.

Tom Cruise Mapother plays US Major William Cage, who is
“detailed” to fight an alien attack in Europe.
The aliens are “colony” organisms with an “Omega” brain and many layers
of tentacles, who can “reset time” (much as in “Source Code”). Cage fights the aliens in multiple battles,
getting “killed” each time but waking up in the same spot, prodded by his
bosses for battle again, having learned more about the aliens’ weaknesses. Emily Blunt joins in as Sgt. Rita. There’s no problem with women in combat.

I’ve never been particularly impressed by time-travel
scenarios. Generally, they confound
logic, But I’ve actually proposed something a little like this for my own early
novel “The Proles” (discussion here on my Wordpress blogs ) .

There’s another idea that’s important here: Cage doesn’t want to risk his own butt by
going into combat himself. He wants
“proles” to be cannon fodder in his stead.
This sounds like the moral debate we had in the 1960s over the draft and
student deferments. He also doesn’t
believe he has to report to European authorities. The script has lines like "the battlefield is redemptive" and that warriors are the most important people on the planet.

The alien attack seems to cover Eurasia (including China and
Russia) but not North America. It would
be interesting to dramatize what really would happen in the first days after
public alien contact. I’m working on it.

The film has a visually striking climax a the Louvre (I visited it once, in 2001).

Don’t confuse the film with “The Day After Tomorrow” or the
expired soap opera “Search for Tomorrow”.

The official site is here This is a typical collaboration of Warner
Brothers and Australian production company Village Roadshow.

There’s another big movie story right now – the Sony
hack. This concerns demands that Sony
not release “The Interview” (directed by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, with
James Franco) in which two journalists, to be played by Rogen and Franco, are “stumped”
by the CIA into an assassination plot against the “emperor” of North
Korea. The actual evidence tends suggest
that the malware (and threats) perhaps did not come from the DPRK, but from
someone with inside knowledge of Sony (although this could be a party overseas, like in China, familiar with Sony and "hired" by DPRK).
The threat "escalated" today and has been reported as physical, trying to
intimidate Sony into not allowing the film to be shown in the US, at least in
theaters, maybe not at all. There will
surely be much more news on this matter quickly. The FBI and DHS might not have shared all
they know yet with the media. The most
balancedaccount so far seems to be on Vox, which leads to a detailed link
story by Timothy B. Lee.

What is so disturbing about the matter is the psychology of
it. The idea that a foreign element
would interfere with private business and activities of private citizens for a
reason that sounds facetious and silly is indeed disturbing. Imagine intimidation of studios over other
movies, of book publishers over certain books, or of Internet hosts over
certain politically motivated sites by specific UGC users or customers. (The later idea of "nuisance content" -- not spam -- occurs in at least three of my
other screenplay plots, most notably, “69 Minutes to Titan”). The attention is on movie theaters right now,
but that can always change with the next incident. This whole matter also reminds one of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad Cartoon Controversy in Denmark in 2005, and the assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh for the short film "Submission" (2004). And remember Salman Rushdie and "Satanic Verses". At the time, publishers stood up for freedom of speech from foreign threats.

There is also the issue of when “fiction” in a film or book
is taken as a representation of likely future fact – that is, a possible
threat (as in the SCOTUS "Elonis" case, discussed on my main blog Dec. 1, what I call the "implicit content problem"). I talked about that in the
review of “Blackbird”, and a parallel experience with my own script., “The Sub” (as now embedded in my layered screenplay "Do Ask, Do Tell: Conscripted", which really starts out as a kind of "Interview" and which, ironically has its own "time slice" concept). As far as “threats” go, talk is cheap. Any disenchanted person can make something up. But, there’s always the real-world fact that anyone who says certain things at an airport will indeed be arrested.

The New York Times has a more sobering story (by Michael
Cieply and Brooks Barnes) Tuesday night The
Wall Street Journal has a similar account (Ben Fritz, Dannny Yadron and Erich Scwartel)
here. All of this point to the idea that in an
asymmetric world, the “disenfranchised” can try to interfere with the lives of
ordinary Americans by making it appear that the “system” will no longer work
for them. I know from my young adult
days, with contact with the radical Left, how strident the demand to “walk in
the shoes of others” can become. But,
then, again, the leadership of the DPRK isn’t “disenfranchised” – its people
are. Others, though, can try to exploit
this.

As if all this weren't enough. there is a strong 1998 Australian film "The Interview" by Craig Monahan (Pointblank and Cinema Guild), where a detective and suspect (Hugo Weaving) duel verbally in isolation. I saw this at a film festival in the Twin Cities that spring.

Remember, extraterrestrials and aliens still don’t care!

Update: evening, Dec. 17

Sadly, Sony is reported to have given in to the "heckler's veto" by North Korea, and for now has no plans to release the film "The Interview". Maybe they will change their minds when things calm down.

The FBI is reported to have connected North Korea as having initiated the attacks and threats, as in this Fox story. More formal announcements may be made Thursday. The Obama administration had apparently "prescreened" the film in the early fall.

I see that I had reviewed "Team America: World Police, Uncensored and Unrated" (2004, Paramount, Trey Parker), animated, back on my older "doaskdotell.com", on a page where it is paired with "Southpark: Bigger, Longer and Uncut", complete with "blaming Canada", the USO, Big Gay Al, and libertarian support for personal responsibility.

Michael Moore says that "Fahrenheit 9/11" caused threats, and the company and theaters just hired more security.

Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post writes a ballsy analysis of the idea that "The Interview", however very silly, may be more "political" than we admit. Of course, the DPRK fears that copies o the film would leak into the country and get seen by "ordinary people."

Update: Morning, Dec. 19

George Clooney has an "interview" on Deadline here. He discusses a petition that others in Hollywood would not sign.

CNN says that early Friday morning Sony executives received another message late Dec. 19 saying "you did the right thing" and that no further damage would occur if Sony behaves. Really?

Update: Dec. 23

Sony has agreed to a limited release Christmas Day to standalone independent theaters. CNN has a story here, with alist of theaters, including the Alamo Drafthouse in Loudoun County, VA. I don't see the West End Cinema in Washington yet, but the owner had said that his theater would never give in to bullying, so I suspect it may show up there soon. It would seem likely that shows will sell out online quickly, and that additional police will be on hand. Moviegoers on Christmas Day will have to weigh other films that are, frankly, more "important" socially, like "Selma" and "Unbroken". I'll review the Seth Rogen comedy when I have seen it on a separate posting.

Update: Dec. 24.

The partial list of theaters is here. West End Cinema in Washington DC has an entry here. The film can be rented on YouTube for $5.99 as of now, but I'm not sure if there are problems with huge sudden demand. I will next discuss this film when I have time to see it. Frankly, there are a few others, for artistic reasons and my own schedule, in front of it.

Monday, December 15, 2014

“Endure”, directed by Joe O’Brien, is a well-paced police
drama, set around Lakeland, FL, showing us how police work is really done and
how it affects their lives.

The film is a bit sensational as it opens as we see a (pregnant)
young woman Daphne (Clare Kramer) gagged and bound on a floor. Right after the credits, a middle-age man
ties her to a tree in a swamp, and then drives away, and is suddenly killed
when his car strikes a deer.

The rest of the movie traces the efforts of detective Emory
Lane (Judd Nelson) and his partner, “criminology major” and rookie cop Zeth
(Devon Sawa) to find the woman. Zeth
struggles through some computer hacking to find a criminal partner in Alabama
(Tom Arnold, who looks appropriately creepy), who eventually travels to the
site to try to exploit Dapne, but ironically helps save her.

The mortician (no black suit) discovers that the kidnapper and crash “victim”
Douglas (Tyler Cravens) has actually abused himself (possibly severely), and
that’s reinforced it you look closely.

Another plot complication is that Emory’s wife is dying of
cardiomyopathy. He has a caregiver at
home which allows him to work on the case.

The plot seems to be based on a true-life case in South
Carolina, with a co-conspirator in Alabama, presented on HLN this summer; I caught the story by accident while in a
hotel room in NYC before going out (TV blog, June 29). I think Nancy Grace has discussed this case
before. It could have made a good
Dateline report.

The lead role Judd Nelson says it is harder to play a good
guy than a villain, in the “Behind the Scenes” short.

Sunday, December 14, 2014

My overall reaction to Ridley Scott’s retelling of the
Exodus story “Exodus: God and Kings” is that it helps explain “tribalism” and
the tendency for people to have to do things in groups, in solidarity,
especially religious or ethnic solidarity. It also helps show the susceptibility of
people to radicalization, at least revolution. That’s the way of the most of history, and I
escaped most of it for most of my adult life.

The film obviously gives Scott a chance to show off the
latest CGI in 3-D, and the movie conveys the look of an alien civilization on
another planet. The vision, however cluttered
with ancient urban shanty, is impressive and detailed.

I saw “The Ten Commandments” with my family in 1954 at the
old RKO Keiths in downtown Washington, and so it’s pretty hard to top
that. Scott-Free's new film short circuits the whole Golden Calif episode. Arnold Schoenberg tells the story in his opera "Moses and Aaron".

When the pestilences come, about 90 minutes into the 150
minute film, the play out in quick, hushed succession. They indeed take the movie into horror,
however directed at “the enemy”. There
is even some impressive CGI work creating multiple tornadoes in the Red Sea
scene.

Christian Bale is charismatic enough as Moses, but in the
movie’s length, his loyalty change back to his own people is really not told
clearly enough. Scott’s idea of using a
child as an angel representing God or Jehovah is interesting; another adult
would compete too much for Bale. Some of
the rest of the cast, such as Joel Edgerton as Ramses, Ben Mendelsohn as the
viceroy, Andrew Tarbet as Aaron, and Sigourney Weaver as Tuya, are just OK. Some critics have noticed that most of the
cast, even playing the Egyptians, are white.

This movie is of the “spectacle” genre. The best film of all time of this nature was
the first Cinemascope picture from Fox in 1953, “The Robe”, based on the novel
by Lloyd C. Douglas. I remember crying
at the end, at the age of 8. I saw this
in the old Jefferson Theater on Route 50 near Falls Church, VA, the first “neighborhood”
theater to be remodeled for Cinemascope.

The official site (from 20th Century Fox) is
here. The Fox trailer starts “when men ruled
as gods”. But they had clay feet.

The film was shot largely in Spain and the Canary Islands
(only a little in Egypt). The latter is
ironic, since the Canaries have a volcano, Cumbre Vieja, which could cause a
100-foot or more tsunami all the way across the Atlantic (with an 8 hour
warning) if it erupted and caused an underwater landslide (link).

I saw this film before a light Sunday night audience in a
large auditorium at Regal Ballston.

I did see Otto Preminger’s "Exodus" (based on Leon Uris) in
high school (in 1960).

Saturday, December 13, 2014

At the QA for a showing of his film “What It Was” at the HRC
Friday night Dec. 13 for Reel Affirmations, director Daniel Armando said that
he was inspired by the style of Terrence Malick.

Indeed, the story is layered, reflective and visual, with
little dialogue. Adina (Arlene
Chico-Lugo), a Latino actress, has lost her sister and seen her marriage
collapse while living and working in LA.
She returns home to the Bronx, and finds her true self, partly with
another woman (Deidre Herlihy), but also with another male Puerto Rican actor
(Lenny Thomas).

The film does have some odd effects, making a lot of body
art and paintings sessions.

There have been other esoteric gay films, most notably “Judas
Kiss”, in Malick-style, but this time the emphasis are on the artistic and
visual values of a community of color. And the experience is truly bisexual.

One could wonder if the film could have a “prequel”, showing
what life is like in LA for younger and less established actors, leveraging
themselves on social media.

I could imagine a film with this concept, about my life when I returned from "my own life" in other cities home to look after my mother in the past decade. It wasn't pretty. Maybe a better title would be "What It Had Been."

The look of this film is often mid 70s or 80s. I don’t recall much modern technology in
effect. This how some of New York when I
lived there in the late 70s.

Afterward there was reception, and the food was definitely
ethnic, and right out of an Anthony Bourdain “Parts Unknown”, which has visited
the Bronx.

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